PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN NETWORKED SITUATIONS
On March 16, 2000, Amazon.com (AMZN), one of the leading E-commerce sites on the Internet, crashed at 2:08 p.m., Pacific Coast Time. The company has one of the most technically advanced performance management system in the world, and has spent more than $400 million building and maintaining its systems.
According to the flash news release from Wired, ôThe technical problem was internal and was not a denial-of-service attack, according to Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith. From 2:08 p.m. to 3:09 p.m. PST, Amazon users were met with a message informing them that æour store is closed temporarilyÆö (Couzin, 2000, Online).
The company wouldnÆt disclose the financial details of the loss, but some analysts suggested that the outage could have cost upwards of $500,000 in missed revenues. What happened?
ôAmazon engineers didn't know what caused the crash, but weÆre working to find out. Although she acknowledged that the company is concerned about such system failures and the loss of business that inevitably accompanies them,[the spokesman] also pointed out that a site the size of Amazon is bound to hiccup now and thenö (Couzin, 2000, Online).
For many companies, problems associated with creating a comprehensive performance management system have been daunting. And in general, there are two broad categories of performance management technical problems -- Intranet and Internet. Since both of these have to do with network connectivity, both WAN and LAN, it is essential to focus on both areas.
The Amazon situation described above is an example of an Internet performance management problem. However, most of the serious PM problems have to do with the Intranets that are installed in most major companies.
Most companies have five or more years of contracts, invoices, customer service letters, internal memos, memos, and other such documents with valuable commercial c...